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Damming up metastasis

How platelet ‘decoys’ could prevent cancer metastasis

February 28, 2019 7:09 PM UTC

Wyss Institute researchers and colleagues have developed non-aggregating platelets that could prevent cancer metastasis.

As described this month in Science Translational Medicine, the team reduced the binding capability of normal human platelets with a detergent that stripped them of most of their receptors. The resulting "platelet decoys" retained the morphology of normal platelets and enough receptors to facilitate binding to tumor cells, but not enough to activate their aggregation-promoting processes...